Cult leader Charles Manson was back in a central California prison on Saturday after a reported hospital stay for an unspecified medical problem.

Manson, 82, was at California state prison, Corcoran, said Jeffrey Callison, a spokesman for the state department of corrections and rehabilitation.

“We never stated he was anywhere else,” Callison said in an email. “Medical privacy laws do not allow [the department] to discuss inmates’ medical issues, if any.”

The department has declined to comment on reports from TMZ and the Los Angeles Times that earlier in the week Manson was taken to a hospital in Bakersfield, 60 miles south of the prison.

While the prison has medical facilities, California prisoners generally are sent to outside hospitals if they need “surgical services, emergency care, or diagnostic services of an acute nature”, Joyce Hayhoe, a spokeswoman for the federal receiver who controls prison medical care, said on Tuesday.

Manson is serving a life sentence for orchestrating the 1969 murders of the actor Sharon Tate, who was pregnant, and six others in southern California.

The cult leader had attracted disaffected young people who lived in an old movie ranch on the edge of Los Angeles that Manson turned into a commune. Prosecutors said Manson and his “family” of followers were trying to incite a race war.

Manson and his followers Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Charles “Tex” Watson were convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

All were spared execution when a US supreme court ruling temporarily banned the death penalty in 1972.

Another Manson Family member, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, was never charged in the murders but went to prison for trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. Fromme, whose gun did not fire, was paroled in 2009.